ABOUT 

Metta’s life and work are rooted in a devotion to joy, authenticity, and continual becoming. Their artistic path has never been linear—rather, it has unfolded as a living ecosystem of experimentation, rebellion, tenderness, and transformation.

 

Their early work emerged from the streets of early-2000s Williamsburg, where Metta turned found objects and discarded materials into small hybrid creatures—offerings born from frustration with disposable culture and consumer mythologies. These playful yet pointed installations appeared throughout the neighborhood like renegade seeds, echoing a post-punk Johnny Appleseed scattering strange life into the cracks of a gentrifying city.

 

This body of work led to the co-founding of a gallery just down the street—an experimental space that soon became a home for contemporary art by emerging artist. Its name, Klaus Von Nichtsagend which means

"says nothing," chosen as an act of quiet protest, translated as a critique of the inauthenticity and capitalist creep entering a community once built on creative freedom. As commercial pressures grew heavier, Metta eventually sold their share in the gallery, traded it for a painting, and followed a quieter call north.

 

Music has always woven alongside Metta’s visual practice. With banjo in hand (lovingly named Curly), and later as a founding member of the band Frankenpine, their creative life expanded into sound, rhythm, and communal performance. Parenthood soon became another central artform, and the Hudson Valley replaced Brooklyn as both landscape and collaborator.

 

In the forests of Cold Spring, Metta began working with fallen branches—listening to how discarded limbs wanted to reassemble themselves. What began as small experiments grew into a massive nest; a sculptural sanctuary that became a ceremonial and musical gathering place for community. That same language of interwoven strength and fragility soon translated onto paper through intricate ink and pencil drawings—maps of an unseen architecture, honoring the intelligence inside natural forms.

 

Their visual work has evolved through phases: from nature-based imagery to explorations of beauty, objectification, and AI-generated bodies; from cultural critique to reverence for medicine traditions and the pursuit of love as a spiritual practice. Throughout, Metta’s art traces a continual inquiry into what it means to be human in a world of distortion and wonder.

 

Metta’s story cannot be told without honoring the personal transformation that runs parallel to the work. Through the dismantling of inherited masculine conditioning, they entered a long process of undoing and becoming—one that made room for fluidity, play, softness, and power. This journey took visible shape through drag performance, ceremony, and satire via the character Sheila Starseed: not a shaman, but a sha-woman—a glittering mirror held up to the contradictions of spiritual culture.

 

Alongside the art, Metta has written publicly on gender, masculinity, and sexuality, offering language where there was once silence and connection where there had been isolation. 

 

Their work, in all its forms, is both a personal liberation and a collective invitation: to soften, to question, to re-enchant, and to belong more deeply in one’s self.